By Prensa Latina,
Madrid : The Spanish Senate completed the process to ratify the Lisbon Treaty, a tool which will replace the failed draft of the European Constitution and which must come into effect in January 2009.
The document was approved on Tuesday, at an extraordinary Senate session to speed up the completion of the parliamentary procedure, which was scheduled for October.
The treaty was sanctioned by 232 votes from the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, the Popular Party, the Socialist Party of Catalonia, Convergence and Union, the Basque Nationalist Party, the Canary Coalition and the Aragon Party.
Six senators from the Republican Ezquerra of Catalonia, the Galician Nationalist Bloc and the Bloc for Mallorca voted against the document. The representative of the Initiative of Green Catalonia and the independent senator from Navarra, Francisco Javier Muñon, abstained from voting.
The document was approved by the house of deputies by 322 votes in favor, six against and two abstentions on June 26.
Spain is the 23rd European country that ratifies the Lisbon Treaty without submitting the document to a popular referendum, as in Ireland, the only country that has rejected the treaty, signed in December 2007 in the Portuguese capital.
Only Sweden, Italy and the Czech Republic have not approved the treaty, which must be sanctioned by 27 EU member countries before coming into effect, an impossible requisite after Ireland rejected the treaty.